28 January 2018

Albert Cossery: Une ambition dans le désert (1984)

Une ambition dans le désert is a gem from Albert Cossery, and I can only describe it as an anarchist rant thinly hidden within a kind of detective story. Not that the 'how' and the 'why' are too important here though, as the back cover tells us the basic plot before the reader begins the book: sheikh Ben Kadem is prime minister of a fictitious, poor, oil-free gulf state and wants to change things round, to make people on the international scene look to him as an important leader instead of those in the rich states. So he invents a ghost opposition by having bombs go off at unimportant targets in the hope that his people will rise up against the imaginary terrorists and make him a world hero. But, as we learn on the back cover, his son Mohi is killed in a bomb explosion.

Knowing all this already, and a whole lot more, the interest of the book focuses on the description and the activities of the characters, which is Cossery's forte here: he's far more interested in psychology and colour than plot. We know that Shaat is performing the intentionally impotent bomb attacks for Ben Kadem, and that the central character is Samantar, the 'marginal aristocrat [...] who embodies scepticism, intelligence, wisdom and phlegm, dear to all Cossery's heroes'.

Samantar has inherited a little land he's never seen (he hates cars as they're part of the modern world he loathes) and rents it out to a man who pays him regularly and also includes a chunk of cannabis in a cigarette packet when he does so: it would in any case be against Samantar's interests to enquire further into what his tenant farmer is actually growing on his land. Samantar's land interests mean he doesn't have to work, and can live a relatively poor but calm existence enjoying reading, young women, smoking, and lazing: who wants anything more.

But Samantar is even put off love-making by this wave of apparently meaningless bombs attacks on nothing, which have injured no one. He wants to know what's behind it, why the peace of Dofa (the capital, where the whole story takes place) is being disturbed. So he goes to see Hicham, whose twelve-year-old daughter has learnt to skin up a mean spiff while the men try to figure things out.

They visit one of the seedy bars where shady characters hang out and Samantar is surprised to see that Shaat has been let out of jail so soon after being handed a stiff sentence for gold smuggling. Shaat was the son of the family servant and Samantar grew up with, they became close friends and Shaat has always had similar ideas to Samantar's, which is why it's very odd that he's dressed like a spiv and arrives in a vintage car. Could Shaat be behind the jobs at all? It doesn't seem to be in his nature, although the yarn that Shaat spins him about his early release and having a new job selling household electrical goods in the villages in the north rings false: what use would any villager have for an electrical product when they have no electricity?

Gradually the truth unwinds through Ben Kadem (who is his richer cousin who likes to chew the intellectual fat with a kindred intellectual (if not spiritual) mind, but more through the town idiot Tareq, who just stands near Higazi (Shaat's apparent partner in crime) as he sits in the bar for low-life, looking towards Shaat as if pointing to a very important lead: is he an idiot savant, I couldn't help wondering?

Now, Ben Kadem has an unknown son by a poor girl with whom he had a relationship, but Mohi has always denied his father, always hated him. And things come to a head (really an end) when Mohi is found dead is the street, killed by a prematurely exploded bomb while he was on the way to kill his father and himself with him.

Samantar learns the truth from Shaat, also from Tareq (who's been setting up his own mini-bomb factory) and is also a (hidden) member of Dofa's intelligentsia, merely posing as an idiot: you can learn everything that's going on when no one cares about your presence because they think you're an idiot.

And Samantar also hears Ben Kadem's version of the truth, although he doesn't understand why he is so sad, why he will no longer be sending Shaat to make more bombs: no one will ever learn the truth of who Mohi really was.

Britaine

Slump, by Will Self

Gallia – Ménie Muriel Dowie

Gallia (1895) is a rather obscure novel which emphatically belongs to the New Woman sub-genre, and concerns a young intellectual woman who refuses to comply with the prevailing gender constructs: this is a Victorian woman with spunk.

Westering Women

Chancy develops the theory of culture-lacune, a revolutionary strategy by means of which Haitian women writers both celebrate and fight the absence and the loss which has been the female voice in the history of the country. In Haitian women writers, a folkloric figure is used as a tool: they 'reformulate the marabout eternalized in Oswald Durand's still popular folksong "Choucoune" of 1883.' Whereas Durand's Choucoune is a figure of betrayal who stands for a lost Haiti, the women writers transform her and reclaim her for themselves. Some writers included in this study are Anne–christine d'Adesky, Ghislaine Charlier, Marie Chauvet, Jan J. Dominique, Nadine Magloire, Edwidge Danticat, and the earlier writers Virgile Valcin, and Annie Desroy.

The Clansman – Thomas Dixon

The Marrow of Tradition – Charles W. Chesnutt

At the end of The Marrow of Tradition (1901), the black Dr Miller enters the house of the white Carteret family in an attempt to save the life of their young child. Previously, Major Carteret had not allowed Miller to tend to his son because Miller is black, and Miller's own young son has just died in a skirmish instigated by the Major himself. Clearly, Chesnutt's focus of interest is not on the fate of the white family's son, but on the integrity of Dr Miller. The novel is set 'Wellington', although there are parallels between this fictional town and Wilmington, North Carolina, which was the scene of a 'race riot' in 1898. Dr Miller represents the 'New Negro', the educated, ambitious and socially aware black person beginning to emerge through many years of slavery in the Southern states, through the subservience of Uncle Tomism, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and now through the appalling compromise of the Jim Crow laws in the South.* Most of all, though, all black people have to battle against a wall of prejudice that still exists, where whites not only segregate and bar, but are only too eager, particularly via lynching, to apply the rule of the mob. The book is a kind of thriller and obviously is influenced by many Victorian novels that have gone before it (and there is an unfortunate strong touch of melodrama towards the end), but it is evident that the novel's main purpose is didactic. *Along with T. S. Stribling's Birthright and Chesnutt's own Mandy Oxendine, there is a scene in which the segregation of blacks from whites on a train takes place.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil – John Berendt

I approached this book, which Edmund White calls a 'non-fiction novel', with some caution because of its great popularity: I'm generally very suspicious of books that are popular. However, I was very pleasantly surprised, and also surprised that it has in fact proved so popular, as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is hardly a conventional novel. It's a love affair John Berendt had with Savannah, Georgia, and which brought a stream of tourists into the city in search of the human and architectural sights mentioned, such as Bonaventure Cemetery (where the poet Conrad Aiken's bench grave stands), or perhaps a sighting of Savannah's larger-than-life characters, like 'female impersonator' The Lady Chablis, or hope for an invitaton to a party such as the ones thrown by Joe Odom, the highly likeable con merchant. These characters move around the main story, which is the murder of the priapic Danny Hansford by his employer and occasional lover, the antique furniture dealer Jim Williams, who lived in the impressive Mercer House, the former home of songwriter Johnny Mercer. The novel is funny and fast-moving, but there is a structural problem: it is too episodic, and although the murder and subsequent trials are the central issue, the colourful characters who flit in and out of it somehow don't merge too well with this central interest.

Life in the Iron-Mills - Rebecca Harding Davis

First published in 1861 and based on the experiences of Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) in Wheeling, Virginia, which is today in West Virginia, Life in the Iron-Mills is now seen as a seminal work of American realism. This short story, originally published in Atlantic Monthly, was her masterpiece, and was rediscovered by Tillie Olsen, who wrote an Afterword to the Feminist Press edition in 1972.

Birthright - T. S. Stribling

See post for comment (using the 'SEARCH BLOG' facility to the top left of the page).

Feather Crowns - Bobbie Ann Mason

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café - Fannie Flagg

In Country - Bobbie Ann Mason

Mandy Oxendine - Charles W. Chesnutt

This novel was originally written towards the close of the 19th century, and was in fact the first novel Chesnutt wrote. However, The House behind the Cedars (1900) was his first published novel, and it would be 100 years after Mandy Oxendine was written that it was in fact published. This is the story of two mixed race lovers - both of whom could pass for white - Mandy and Tom Lowrey, who part for two years while Tom goes off to educate himself. When he comes back, it is to work in a school for black children, while Mandy is in a white school passing herself as white. Tom's problem is that Mandy now believes that she is in love with the rich womanizer Robert Utley, although the novel develops into a thriller - almost a whodunnit - when Utley is killed when attempting to sexually assault Mandy. A tale of race, class and gender conflict, Mandy Oxendine was considered too daring for publication at the time it was written.

Anitfanaticism: A Tale of the South, by Martha Haines Butt

An anti-Tom novel, and the only novel by this author.

Dorothy Allison – Bastard out of Carolina

Gods in Alabama - Joshilyn Jackson

Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College 1933-57

Fremsley (1987) – Ivor Cutler

A collection of poems, musings and observations from the eccentric Glaswegian Ivor Cutler, a man who was admired by people of all ages. When The New Musical Express once asked him how he would spend Christmas, he said in bed, with the bedclothes pulled around him until it went away. The most notable in the collection: 'A Strategy Suit with a Jelly Pocket'.

The Autobiography of Samuel Bamford: Volume Two: Passages in the Life of a Radical

Roger Vailland: the Man and His Masks – J. E. Flower

Mrs Caldwell Speaks to Her Son (1953; trans. 1968) – Camilo José Cela

Originally published as Mrs. Caldwell habla a su hijo.

Her (1960) – Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Ferlinghetti is best known as the co-founder of the City Lights bookstore and publisher on Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA, which published Allen Ginsberg's first book of poems, Howl, in 1956. Ferlinguettti's most well known work is A Coney Island of the Mind (1960). The bookstore is recommended, as is the pub Vesuvio's next door to it (with Jack Kerouac Alley between), which is a kind of shrine to the Beat Generation.

As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1937) – Oliver St John Gogarty

Oliver St John Gogarty is perhaps best remembered for his relationship with James Joyce. A former drinking partner of Joyce's in the early years, Gogarty later became the butt of Joyces insults. In Joyce's early poem 'The Holy Office', Gogarty is represented as a snob, and more famously, there is another representation at the beginning of Ulysses (‘stately plump Buck Mulligan’) in the Martello tower: Joyce had stayed with Gogarty in the Martello tower at Sandy Cove.

The Days Before – Katherine Anne Porter

Critical essays from the Texan noted for her short stories Flowering Judas (1930) and Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), and for her novel Ship of Fools (1962)

The American 1930s: A Literary History – Peter Conn

Interesting for its inclusion of a number of obscure writers.

A Feast of Snakes (1976) – Harry Crews

Harry Crews is one of the wild men of literature. Of working-class origin, Crews writes about the underbelly of America, of drugs, alcohol abuse, and trailer park communities in the Deep South, for instance. He was born in southern Georgia but has spent most of his life in Florida. The problem is perhaps that he also spent too long parodying himself, and it can make us forget his undoubted importance as a serious writer. This is a link to a youtube interview, in which he boasts of spending 30 years of his life drunk every day, and illustrates this problem very well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpeFmXJG4Ak.

Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936 Anne Goodwyn Jones

How Late It Was, How Late (1994) - James Kelman

James Kelman - H. Gustav Klaus

James Kelman - Simon Kövesi

The most comprehensive critical work on Kelman so far, although it was published too late to include his latest novel, Kieron Smith, Boy.

Translated Accounts - James Kelman

A Disaffection - James Kelman

The Ticket That Exploded - William Burroughs

Festus: A Poem - Philip J. Bailey

A plaque on a building on the north corner of Fletcher Gate and Middle Pavement, Nottingham, UK, reveals that the writer Philip James Bailey (1816–1902) once lived there. Bailey was born in Nottingham and educated in Glasgow, and is usually associated with the Spasmodic school of poetry along with J. W. Marston, S. T. Dobell, and Alexander Smith. He is most noted for Festus, a huge work to which Bailey was continually adding, and which was heavily influenced by Milton's Paradise Lost. Its most famous lines are: 'We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts not breaths; / In feeling, not in figures on a dial / We should count time by theart throbs; he most lives / Who thinks most, feels noblest, acts the best.' There is a bronze bust of Bailey by Albert Toft at the rear entrance to Nottingham Castle.

The Life and Times of Thomas Spence P. M. Ashraf

The Kretzmer Syndrome - Peter Way

The Withered Root (1929) - Rhys Davies

My Wales - Rhys Davies

Soldier Songs - Patrick Macgill

Skerrett - Liam O'Flaherty

A Pig in a Poke - Rhys Davies

The Home-Maker - Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Half an Eye: Sea Stories - James Hanley

The Contradictions - Zulfikar Ghose

The Death of Christopher - John Sommerfield

Boy James Hanley

Rhys Davies: A Critical Sketch - R. L. Mégroz

Ellen Glasgow - Barren Ground

The Back-to-Backs (1930) - J. C. Grant

A real obscurity. When it was published, this book – which depicts life in a mining community – was roundly attacked for what was considered to be a brutal attack on the life of miners. Very little is known of Grant, who also wrote poems, although his birth certificate reveals that he was born in Alnwick, Northumbria, to a father who was an author, newspaper editor, and manager.

Trouble dans les Andains - Boris Vian

Spacetime Inn - Lionel Britton

Senselessness - Horacio Castellanos Moya

Le Rivage des Syrtes - Julien Gracq

Rhinocéros - Eugène Ionesco

The Poor Mouth - Flann O'Brien

Out Such Between Through Christine Brooke-Rose

A Frolic of His Own - William Gaddis

Caligrammes - Guillaume Apollinaire

Belle du Seigneur - Albert Cohen

Plays, Poems and Theatre Writings - Joe Corrie

Trouble in Porter Street - John Sommerfield

Men Adrift - Anthony Bertram

Truly Obscure. A novel about philosopher and a writer who meet on a boat. They talk.